All posts tagged: Michal Luczak

Now in its 10th year, the Prix Levallois is one of the leading prizes for young photographers, and its latest list of 15 nominees includes Antoine Bruy, Bieke Depoorter, Michal Luczak, Leslie Moquin, Alexey Shlyk, and Maria Sturm & Cemre Yesil

At 11.41pm on 07 December 1988, a cold and snowy day, Armenia was struck by a 7 degree Richter earthquake. Some 25,000 people died and a further 514,000 were made homeless; the city of Spitak was worst affected, with a third of the population killed and all but one of its buildings destroyed. Since then very little has changed in Armenia, but the political landscape around it has been entirely reshaped. The USSR collapsed just a few years after the earthquake in 1991, with the disaster coming to symbolise its failure when Mikhail Gorbachev was forced to call for international aid to handle it. In Spitak the USA and Germany built small wooden houses for those who had been displaced, and the Soviet government promised more permanent homes would follow within two years. In 2013, when Michal Luczak visited, people were still living in the huts. The Polish photographer decided to delve deeper with a documentary project, and was soon joined by the writer Filip Springer. “We don’t ask about that day. They don’t talk,” they write in their resulting …